Meeting Minutes Feb 3rd, 2009 @ Mulligan's St Pete Beach.
Call to order 7:30pm Mike Meehan. Thanks for coming lots to discuss.
Thomas handed out LocalS test. A number of fill in the blank questions based on right of way in the lineup. Pass the test get a locals sticker. The S is capitolized to represent Surfrider Foundation. Put it on your car or your surfboard. Live the good vibes promoted. Spread the word to surf shops and online to surfers world wide. Stickers were free, printed by Jason (6inall) and designed by Cheeta Chad. Nice work guys!
Brandy & Andre would like to head up a planting session with the Cub Scouts on one of our beaches. Would like to do it for March or April if the schedule allows. Colin stepped up and offered up the assistance of the environmental club at St. Pete High. Colin and Brandy exchanged info to begin work on this project. Lee is needed. Lee knows all about beach planting. If anyone knows where to find Lee tell him to contact Surfrider. Also contact with the Tampa Bay Aquatic Society.
Brandy handed over cd's filled with pictures from the Suncoast Party and Fashion show. The pics are great! Huge crowd, beautiful people, lots of fun. We have a cd for every surfshop who participated.
Committee sign up sheets available. Plastics, Fund Raisers, Beach Clean Up, Tabling events, Upham, and LocalS campaign all represented. Lot's of people signed up for committees by the end of the night. Also sign up to nominate yourself or someone else for the 2 board positions up for re-election in April 2009. At first glance there seems to be 3 or 4 people stepping up.
Plastics Campaign. Plastic is a huge problem to the environment. Surfrider started its Rise Above Plastics campaign and the chapter should take this issue up. The committee is brand new working from the ground up to help ban single use plastics, starting with grocery bags. This issue was received well by members present and several people signed up to be on the Plastics Committee.
Florida Regional Manager for Surfrider Ericka D'Avanzo was on hand with her attorney friend/partner Martha Collins.
The chapter headed into discussion of the Upham Beach Campaign which took up the remainder of the meeting.
Ericka stated, this chapter needs a SOLID STRONG UNIFIED position on UPHAM. As a Surfrider Chapter, we cannot support anything (any man made structures) on the public beach.
Surfrider can lean on the Inlet management Study done 20 years ago as it has information in it on alternatives to permanent structures. We can surely find more updated information on the cost of sand bypass and other alternatives.
It was mentioned by Ericka that the state of Florida normally gets about 50 million dollars a year for beach management however due to the poor economy and cutbacks the state is only going to be alotted about 3 million dollars this year. That's huge news for places like Upham and the Blind Pass Inlet because the inlet is considered non main-navigatable pass which means there are more important bigger Inlets and beaches in the state that the money will be alotted to first.
Lenny suggested filing a legal injunction against (the city?) to hold them up from doing anything further on Upham.
He also suggested making the beach a private beach in which the condo owners would be financially responsible for the beach in front of their property. They would be responsible for maintaining their private beach and no more city, county or state funds would go to help this section of beach. Hit 'em in the pocket book. The problem to this solution is that at the hightide mark, the beach is public no matter what's there.
It's been proven by Surfrider research that if any other waterfront private residence in the state incurrs damage to their seawall or waterside of the property the private resident is required to handle the expense of the repair on their own. Where as these 4 condos on St. Pete Beach have the protection of city, county and state funds to fortify their poorly placed beach front properties continuously for the past 5 decades and indefinately into the future. What makes these condo owners more privilaged than anyone else in the state? This is not fair to all tax payers whom ultimately foot the bill.
Mike advised that we had the petition campaign, did the protests, and when it came time to defend our position 5 Surfrider members were present and the rest of city hall was taken up by condo residents. Dr. Elko layed out a great presentation that pretty much shut us down because we were unprepared for that kind of a presentation. However, Dr. Elko did say she would keep surfers in mind in the design of the permanent structures and would hire engineers whom would work closely with the surfers in the design. That's a compromise. The overall feeling in the meeting among the majority of members present was we don't want to compromise.
The t-head groins on Upham are the reason Suncoast Chapter began in the first place.
Ericka feels we have a real opportunity on February 17th (at the engineers meeting) to make a comeback on this issue.
We need to look at the issue again through and through, find the problems, and look for long term solutions.
Now's the time to put some serious hours behind our stance in upholding Surfrider policy.
Sure we need an expert or two, they're expensive and realistically an expert can't be had before the February 17th meeting, but with some reorganization we can put together a power point presentation and have binders available with our position in it.
Counsil members, we realize, only have 2 years in office before they are replaced so they may not be looking beyone their two years to the bigger picture of things 15 or 20 years down the road.
Jessica, a key member of the Upham Committee since the beginning, stated that's what we need. A power point presentation and binders laying out our stance and what our solutions suggestions are.
(the attorney) says we still need a strong stance and a unified position on Upham.
Lenny suggested, Big, Wide, Safe, Beach. Which we do not have right now in 1/3rd of the groin field area. In order to obtain a big wide safe beach at Upham there must be a doable alternative. Big wide safe beach comes from no structures on the beach, no new structures on the beach, and continue beach nourishment at scheduled intervals or sand bypass. Surfrider Foundation International supports sand bypass because it is a continuation of the flow of down drift sediment.
Our choices to stand on were presented...1) Compromise with design 2) Sand bypass(big wide safe beach) 3) NO action, let the condo's fall into the water.
When put to a vote to those present at the meeting voted yes, big wide safe beach. Get the structures out of there, do not replace them with anything else, and work on feasable solutions including what it would cost the city (cities) to support a pump house sand bypass project or re-nourishment.
Ok if we get into sand bypass then the issue becomes a concern to both St. Pete Beach and Treasure Island since the argument will be about which side of the Blind Pass Inlet does the pump house go on. There is the noise issue with a pump house and since both sides of Blind Pass Inlet are occupied by private residential condos they will be strongly opposed to the pumphouse. However, when looking at Reef Road on the east coast they have a big wide safe beach due to a sand bypass project sucessfully in place. Reaching out to the east coast chapters for advise on sand bypass is a good idea.
The project experiment with the geotextile t-head groins is slated to last for 7 years. At first glance it appears that as the project was supposed to go, there was to be NO re-plenishment of sand there, as we understand it, this is supposed to be an uninterupted experiment on weither or not this type of structure would work in this location.
Pinellas County Commissioners met today (feb 3rd) and agreed with Dr. Elko that the t-head groins are working. It's easy to be lulled into the warm cozy feeling that the groins appear to be working south of the condos but how true are the results when, since the installation of the bags in 2005, sand has been placed there 3 times weither for the sake of renourishment or for construction purposes.
Blamed for vandalism of a t-head groin material in the past, surfers are automatically considered the lower class citizen by the condo owners at least.